From Maranhão to the Amazon
Irineu Serra was born in São Vicente de Férrer, in the northeastern state of Maranhão. His birth year is usually given as 1892 in tradition, though a baptismal certificate later located by researchers Moreira and MacRae lists 1890, a discrepancy the tradition has never fully resolved. Around 1909 he left drought-stricken Maranhão for Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, to work as a rubber tapper, and by 1910–1912 he was employed by the Comissão de Limites, the commission charged with surveying the border among Acre, Peru, and Bolivia.
In 1914, in the frontier town of Brasiléia, Irineu Serra met fellow Maranhão natives Antônio and André Costa. Antônio, who had learned of ayahuasca from a Peruvian ayahuasquero named Don Crescêncio Pizango, introduced Irineu Serra to the brew made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and Psychotria viridis leaf, a preparation long used by Indigenous and mestizo peoples of the region.
The founding vision
According to accounts passed down in the tradition, soon after his first experience with ayahuasca Irineu Serra undertook an eight-day fast alone in the forest, during which he had a miração, or visionary experience, in which the moon approached him with an eagle at its center; a female spiritual figure, first called Clara and later identified as the Queen of the Forest and Our Lady of Conception, is said to have appeared and given him the mission of founding a new religious movement. This is presented in the tradition as revealed experience rather than documented history, and Irineu Serra's hymn "Lua Branca" ("White Moon") is understood to refer to it.
The formal founding is dated to May 26, 1930, when Irineu Serra led the first trabalho, or ritual work, of his new center in Rio Branco, with only two other participants present. Before that date lay roughly a decade and a half of informal practice, including his time with the Círculo de Regeneração e Fé, an earlier ayahuasca-drinking group he had helped organize with the Costa brothers before disputes and police persecution led him to leave it.
Institutional life and the name Santo Daime
Through the 1930s the sacrament came to be called Santo Daime, joining the Portuguese words for "holy" and the imperative "give me," echoing invocations such as "give me light, give me love" heard in the rituals. In 1961 many of Irineu Serra's senior followers joined the Círculo Esotérico da Comunhão do Pensamento, a São Paulo esoteric organization founded in 1909, a step scholars read as an effort to gain social legitimacy for the young religion; several liturgical features, including sessions held on the 15th and 30th of each month and the principles of Harmony, Love, Truth, and Justice, are traced to this association. The relationship ended around 1970 over the Esoteric Circle's objection to Daime being served at its meetings, after which Irineu Serra's center took the name Centro de Iluminação Cristã Universal.
In 1965, Sebastião Mota de Melo — later known as Padrinho Sebastião — met Irineu Serra and, after reporting a healing during a Daime session, became a disciple. Irineu Serra died in 1971, and the divisions that followed among his disciples gave rise to the distinct branches of Santo Daime that exist today.